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They were the words of failure, and the man who spoke them a symbol of failure. Communism has been forced into ideological retreat inside its own empire. Eight years of striving to Bolshevize East Germany in the Soviet image failed in the uprising of June 17. In the westernmost, and in many ways the most strategic, outpost of the Kremlin orbit, people rose up, without arms or organization or leaders, against the whole strength of a totalitarian regime and the Soviet army of occupation. They were suppressed, and not one inch of ground was wrenched from beneath the Red flag. But in their audacity, the East Germans 1) exposed their bosses as scarecrows propped up only by Soviet guns, 2) obliged the Kremlin to promise a reversal of years of ruthless economic and political communization, and 3) punctured a myth which much of the West had come to believe—that Communist tyranny, once installed, is too efficient and too rocklike to be fissured by revolt.
Saddle for a Cow. The prospect before Ulbricht is not at all the way Marx or Lenin or Stalin or Ulbricht had planned it. Before World War II ended, the Soviet master plan for Germany was drawn up and working. Roughly, it was laid out in three stages. Stage One: milk the occupation zone of Germany of all the industrial plants, tools, raw materials, foodstuffs and talent (i.e., top scientists and technicians) that could be transferred to war-damaged Russia. Stage Two: Bolshevize all means of material existence, and force-build agricultural East Germany into a workshop for Russia and the East European satellite states. Stage Three: through ruthless discipline and indoctrination, build a Communist cadre so strong and reliable that it could serve in either of the two eventualities the Kremlin had to plan for—permanent division of Germany, with East Germany a Communist satellite, or a unified Germany, in which the Red core would be strong enough at least to neutralize Germany in the cold war.
Stalin did not underestimate the difficulties. "Communism," he once remarked to a diplomat, "fits Germans the way a saddle fits a cow." The job required an agent as cold and slippery as a block of ice, an unregenerate Dr. Faustus, to whom all East Germany would be a Margarete. Walter Ulbricht was ready. For 25 years the tailor's son from Leipzig had pursued the dark alchemy of Communist intrigue in preparation for the call.
His parents named him Ernst Paul Walter Ulbricht when he was born in 1893, but in later years he got to be known by many aliases—Comrade Cell, Comrade Motor, Sorenson, Urvich, Leo (and, behind his back, Billy Goat). At 15, he joined a workers' youth organization, at 17, the German Woodworkers' Union. At 19, he joined the Social Democratic Party, where he got acquainted with Das Kapital. When a renegade bloc of Socialists merged with Rosa Luxemburg's and Karl Liebknecht's Spartakusbund in 1920 to form the German Communist Party, Walter Ulbricht was there as a charter member. He was an enthusiastic organizer and well-crammed encyclopedia of the dictums and ambiguities of his idol, Lenin. But his prime talent was treachery.